More on Visual Metaphors

In thinking about Alli's post on Visual Metaphors, I decided to see if I could find a few good examples to show. I have used metaphors in a few courses, including the theater for an Instructional Design course, "CSI" for a Resources course, and "Survivor" for an Educational Technology Course. I was not able to find too many examples online, and not too much research. Perhaps someone should do a study on this issue? :-)

I was able to locate these references:

Lee, J. & Hsu, Y. (2004). Visual Metaphor Interface and Cognitive Style: A study for On-line Learning. In Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications 2004 (pp. 4478-4481). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.

Guss, Sarah. Interface Metaphors and Web-Based Learning: Lecture Notes in Computer Science Springer Berlin / Heidelberg from Advances in Web-Based Learning - ICWL 2003

I could only locate a couple of examples:
Marketing Course as "peeling the orange:














Art Education and "tropical sunrise"

If I Write It, They Will Read It.

Numerous studies demonstrate that many students scan text online and read text offline. This means that your well crafted words may not be read on the computer screen. Most readers do not read an online page from start to finish. Here are some ways to write to expose your message:

• Summarize main points in an executive summary format so these points appear at the start to the reading section.
• Use lists and concise paragraphs
• Write for scanning behavior
  -Use heading to organize related concepts
  -Set off important concepts and terminology with text styles
• Create printable documents
  -Readers will print documents if they are comprehensive and contain sufficient detail.

Key Questions for Thinking about Your Distance course

• What do I want the students to learn?
• What is the best way for me to present content to enhance learning?
• How do I create interaction – student-to-student, student-to-instructor, and student-to-content?
• How will I assess that learning occurred?
• How will I get feedback on the course for future improvements?

Sewing up the Threads

You can enhance the readability of discussion boards by working with students to understand a bit more about skills that improve readability in this environment. Teach students to select pertinent information from the previous post. Failure to tie new posts into previous posts makes a discussion difficult to follow and may hide some of the content of the discussion due to readability issues.

Characters

There are certain characters that you should not use when naming files.

Do not use:
Space
Ampersand &
Comma ,
Semicolon ;
Quotes “
Question Mark ?
Slashes / \\

Visual Metaphor

As you put your course together, think about a metaphor that you can weave throughout the course. As an example, an English Literature instructor might choose to organize their course by chapters (like a book) while a Geography instructor might use a map as a metaphor. Use of a metaphor can connect the student to the content and provide some relief from organizational strategies that look and feel the same to the student.

Bloom’s Taxonomy (Revised)

Many instructors use Bloom’s Learning Taxonomy to guide instructional decisions. Anderson and Krathwohl (2001) revised the original taxonomy to include dimensions of knowledge and cognitive processes.

Go to http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/Articles/bloomrev/ to learn more about how to use this revised taxonomy to revise learning objectives for your courses.